1. Field
This disclosure generally relates to audio environments. More particularly, the disclosure relates to an editable audio track environment.
2. General Background
Digital audio workstations are typically utilized to generate and edit audio tracks. As an example, digital audio workstations typically allow a user to edit individual audio tracks and then combine those audio tracks into an audio mix. The processing load for such digital audio workstations can be quite high when audio tracks are being edited. Accordingly, users of the digital audio workstations typically freeze one or more audio tracks to reduce the processing load for the processors operably connected to the digital audio workstations. By freezing the one or more audio tracks, the users are rendering the real-time audio effects to temporary files on disk. In other words, an output file of the rendering representing the output of track is generated rather than rendering the real-time audio effects to an output device such as a speaker. If the real-time audio effects were rendered to a speaker, then a user would have to process the effects again the next time he or she would like to listen to the audio track. However, freezing an audio track so that a rendered output file is generated allows a user to play that rendered output file subsequent times without having to process the audio track through the real-time audio effects each subsequent time, which saves processing power on the host computer from having to generate effects in real-time.
Although track freezing helps users reduce processing workload, no edits can be performed on the track while the track is in the frozen state. Most applications typically lock frozen tracks for edits or ignore edits for frozen tracks. The user has to manually unfreeze the track, perform the edit, and then manually re-freeze the track. As a result, a user may have to perform a large number of manual interactions to perform audio track editing. The process of manually unfreezing, applying edits, and re-freezing audio tracks is a tedious process. Further, some applications incorrectly place a freeze on a separate track in the audio mix that is unrelated to the frozen track. Therefore, typical digital audio workstation configurations involve a cumbersome editing process that may lead to extensive inefficiencies in the resources and time utilized to complete a rendering of an audio track.